Novelist Eduardo Mendoza has won the 2016 Cervantes Prize. The award comes with $132,000 and will be given to Mendoza in April.
Ed Ou, a Canadian photojournalist on his way to report on the Dakota Access Pipeline protests for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, was detained and denied entry into the US. While in detention, Ou’s cellphone was confiscated after he refused to unlock it for border patrol officials. Once the phone was returned, Ou found evidence that it had been tampered with. Ou’s editor Mark Harrison told the Washington Post that the incident “goes against the very principles of a free and independent media.”
At Politico, journalist Gregory Ferenstein explains why he’s chosen to contribute a regular column to Breitbart News. Now that the Internet has taken away the press’s ability to weaken bad candidates or offensive ideas simply through a lack of coverage, Ferenstein feels that the only way to reach readers with different views is to meet them where they are. “I might vehemently disagree with some of the anti-immigration and militaristic beliefs that Trump used to excite his supporters. But if I want to persuade those supporters—and I do—I have to reach them on the platform where they are getting their ideas,” Ferenstein writes. “In the meantime, I just might be persuaded a bit myself.”
Historian Bruce Mazlish, the author of In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry and other psychoanalytic biographies of world leaders, has died at 93.
Politico founder Jim VandeHei released more details about his new media project yesterday. Axios, Greek for “worthy,” will focus on business, technology, media, and politics. At Vanity Fair, Sarah Ellison notes that the company’s mission statement, ”Media is broken—and too often a scam,” sounds a little familiar. “If you added an emphatic ‘Sad!’ at the end of that sentence it might credibly pass as the latest tweet from President-Elect Donald Trump.”
The debate continues as to whether news outlets should cover each and every tweet sent by Donald Trump. Slate’s Will Oremus asks Twitter and Facebook staff if they would ever ban the president-elect. Facebook feels that “political discourse” is more valuable than protecting users from offensive content, while Twitter notes that anyone in violation of its rules against hate speech can be banned, “including verified accounts.” However, Oremus points out that a social media ban is unlikely: “That he has avoided its censure so far suggests it would take something outlandish even by Trump’s standards for Twitter to take action.”
At the New York Times, Amanda Hess reports on Gab, the new social media site that acts “as a digital safe space for the far right.” While the site is still invitation-only, many well known alt-right stars who have been banned from other social media, including Milo Yiannopoulos, Tila Tequila, and Richard Spencer, have joined the site and brought publicity in recent months. “Think of Gab as the Make America Great Again of social sites,” Hess explains. “It’s a throwback to the freewheeling norms of the old internet, before Twitter started cracking down on harassment and Reddit cleaned out its darkest corners.”